According to USA Today, new Internet addresses, including those entirely in foreign languages, are under review by a key oversight agency.

Individuals and companies outside the United States long have clamored for non-English scripts, finding restrictive the current limitation to the 26 English letters, 10 numerals and the hyphen. Addresses partly in foreign languages are sometimes possible, but the suffix itself for now requires non-English speakers to type English characters.

… Engineers also will continue work on tests to make sure the non-English scripts won’t disrupt users’ ability to send e-mail and reach websites. Nonsensical strings will be entered into the retrofitted domain name system and can be quickly removed if trouble arises.

Meanwhile, ICANN has scheduled workshops to discuss procedures for additional domain suffixes in English. It would be the third major round and the first beyond a pilot since the system was created in the 1980s.